All you need is a foggy night and some fireworks for this happen. As fireworks season is in November – this tends to happen quite often. The primary school a couple of blocks away from us will be having its fireworks display tomorrow – we’ll be watching it from the kitchen as usual, giving us a grandstand view of the proceedings.
I believe this is also what happens if you don’t install Windows 8 properly.
August 11 2006
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to do this, haven’t you? Either that or Rollerblade around the mall – it’s a crime to waste all those lovely flat surfaces! A few years later the heelie was invented, and malls were full of kids essentially recreating this cartoon in real life.
Please keep your animals indoors tonight folks, it’s not safe for them to be out, and those bangs can be terrifying if you don’t know what they are. Different animals have different responses to fireworks. Smudge used to love them, and would watch them from the window sill, pawing at the starbursts that blossomed in the sky. Bella is unconcerned. Billy hides in the wardrobe for the duration.
August 10 2006
Kenny G is huge in China, it appears. How they can tell the difference between any of his insipid tootlings is anyone’s guess. It was reported recently that there’s one tune of his in particular, ‘Going Home’, which is played in every Chinese shopping mall just before closing time, to let shoppers know it’s time to leave. That sounds about right. If I heard his music over the tannoy system I’d try to get as far away from it as possible.
It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night on the Fifth, and people have been having fireworks parties all week. We take them really seriously in Sussex, bonfires and fireworks have been taking place all over the county over the past month. The big one happens in Lewes on Wednesday. Hastings traditionally celebrates its own bonfire night on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and this year’s effigy was of a bus, because we don’t want the bus services around town to be cut. Yes. If there’s anyone out there who understands the logic of that please let me know what it is…
Guy was part of a Catholic plot to blow up James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. Yes, even then terrorist nutters were using religion as an excuse for killing people.
Guy (or Guido to use the name he adopted when fighting for the Spanish in the Eighty Years War) has become a romantic figure of late – helped by the film of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. His mask has since become the millennial equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt – it’s what you wear when you want to vent a half formed political opinion against the powers-that-be. Well, it’s either that or join UKIP. To be honest I think I prefer the mask…
The dog behind the mask is the perennial activist Beebee from ‘Sooky Rottweiller’. And that’s the last guest star I’ll be using for a while – I feel I’ve been overdoing them lately.
Potted biographies of the pariahs Smith mentions in frame 4:
Mutter mutter… when I was a kid… mutter mutter… commercialisation of Halloween… mutter mutter… racks of flammable Halloween costumes made from petrochemicals in supermarkets… mutter mutter… Haribo bogies… mutter mutter… imported American customs bastardising our perfectly good European ones… mutter mutter… trick or treat… mutter mutter… I blame ET… mutter mutter…
Cats have plenty of connections to Halloween, so it’s fine for them to celebrate October 31st. But there’s no need for them to wear a costume.
Note that Chumley, bless his gentle hearted soul, doesn’t quote get the idea of Halloween and is wearing a pair of Mickey ears, mainly because Alison Ward is wearing them at the Halloween party in her strip.
August 9 2006
The design of the mall was heavily influenced by Bluewater in Dartford. I’d made a trip up to the newly opened mall and somehow managed to run around the site with a camera taking reference photos without being apprehended by the security guards.
We haven’t seen Archie for a bit – so here he is, just in time for Halloween. Archie is a cockroach, and like all cockroaches he is a poet who types on an old-fashioned typewriter. Jones would be his Mehitabel if only she realised there was a cockroach typing the messages she finds – but for some reason she thinks it’s a possessed typewriter instead.
August 8 2006
I’ve found the original scans again, so the artwork I put up is going to be in higher definition than the original uploads to Comics Sherpa were. Just by 100 pixels, but every little helps, right?
Introducing Nigel Whelk, our main protagonist. He’s the one in the glasses.
And the analogy I was reaching for was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
I’ve never quite understood why the clocks have to go back in the winter. Winter is gloomy enough without us having the evenings made even darker by government edict. Even in the south of England we’re on roughly the same latitude as Labrador, so the sun sets at half past three in December. In Scotland it’s even worse – one of the main planks of their independence campaign this year was to have the ability to set their own time zone.